Kingdom of Insignificance

In this first scholarly book in English on Miron Bia?oszewski (1922-1983), Joanna Ni?y?ska illuminates the elusive prose of one of the most compelling and challenging postwar Polish writers. Ni?y?ska's study, exemplary in its use of theoretical concepts, introduces English-language readers to a pre-eminent voice of Polish literature. Ni?y?ska explores how a fusion of seemingly irreconcilable qualities, such as the traumatic and the everyday, imbues Bia?oszewski's writing with its idiosyncratic appeal. Bia?oszewski's A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising (1977, revised 1991) describes the Poles' heroic struggle to liberate Warsaw from Nazi occupation in 1944 as harrowing yet ordinary. His later prose represents everyday life permeated by traces of the traumatic. Ni?y?ska closely examines the topic of autobiography and homosexuality, showing how Bia?oszewski discloses his homosexuality but, paradoxically, renders it inconspicuous by hiding it in plain sight.